Crystal Finn is one of our finest theatrical clowns. She excels at being somehow featherbrained and self-assured at the same time; she often plays characters who’ve been promoted just beyond their competence. Finn’s greatest tools are her huge goldfish-bowl eyes. An audience can almost see her character’s thoughts inside them, swimming around in a panic.
She plays one of her signature zanies in Anne Washburn’s “Anon,” a not-quite comedy about extremism at MCC Theater, directed by Anne Kauffman. This time, Finn is Jeanie, a super-online mom who has been swept into the whirlpool of QAnon far-right conspiracy theories. She assiduously, constantly posts TikToks to practically no one, warning of the “gathering storm” and asking, “why is Fauci still free?” Despite her sparse following, she’s sure that she’s doing important work. Eventually, her QAnon delusions crescendo: It turns out John F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t die in 1999 — he’s in hiding, preparing a triumphant return.
But while Jeanie’s belief in a once-and-future John-John seems harmlessly wacky, she is causing actual injury. Her teenage daughter, Delia (Izabel Mar), has ingested her mother’s insistent bigotry, and her husband, Michael (Andrew Garman), dreams of escape. A gay couple moves into Jeanie’s placid Texan suburb, and she rants online about the pride flag on their porch. Ironically, this couple might be her most faithful audience. Adam (Jeff Biehl) procrastinates by scrolling through her content; Will (Jeremy Shamos) passes quickly from puzzlement to an all-consuming obsession with her posts. (Washburn is interested in how gleeful fascination can curdle into the thing it feeds on.)
The first image of this peculiar show is Jeanie, hunched in shadows over her laptop, as projections splash across a nearly featureless dining room. (Jared Mezzocchi designed the clever video, which includes a bizarre fantasy talk-show sequence; the minimalist set was designed by the dots collective; Cha See designed the lights.)
Bombast provides much of the play’s humor. “September, 2024,” the projections say. Then, as the sound designer Tei Blow amps up the spooky Halloween vibes: “Biden’s America.” Conspiracy mongering, though, seems to have progressed beyond art’s ability to satirize it. Simply describing QAnon’s various preoccupations — that JFK Jr. canard for instance — out-gonzos every absurdist who ever wrote.
The momentum of that real-world strangeness unbalances this play. Washburn has always had a jeweler’s precision when it comes to apocalypse, as in works like her masterpiece “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” in which theater persists even after nuclear disaster, and last year’s “The Cauldron of Fiery Fire,” about an agrarian community triggering the end of the United States. My favorite of them all is her eerie miniature from 2010 called “The Small,” in which a murky jar in a health food store contains the harbinger of the end times.
Washburn’s superb when she is carefully titrating menace. She’s expert at layering shadows into crunchy-granola liberalism, showing her (presumed) theater audience its own dark mirror. It’s telling that the setting in “The Small” isn’t just a grocery; it’s a health food store.
In “Anon,” she uses that micrometric attention to minimize differences between left and right, finding ways that Jeanie, Adam and Will’s language can overlap. They have the same humor, the same tastes. The progressive Adam jokes offhandedly about Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories (“Who thinks that was a suicide?”); and Jeanie prides herself on introducing Delia to pleasures like blue cheese and Shakespeare.
When Delia must complete a school assignment on “King Lear,” Washburn harnesses “Anon” to the older, graver tragedy. Delia and her combative mother discuss theatrical speech — “in a soliloquy, words take the place of swords,” Delia says, rather unbelievably — and the play tries to link the QAnon’s “storm” imagery to Shakespeare’s cataclysm. But even with Mar zestily declaiming cod-Jacobean verse, the play seems to lose confidence.
For once in a Washburn play, the meta-theatrical link refuses to make contact; the mixture doesn’t gel. Perhaps it’s because QAnon craziness keeps smashing through any subtle treatment. Once the door to that mythology is opened, all of its mania pours in, throwing off Washburn’s exacting ratio between satire and drama. The production tries to strike a middle path of gentle eccentricity: Kauffman has chosen her cast for comedy — Garman, Shamos, Biehl and Finn are all ultra-skilled silly-billies. The adults in “Anon” therefore seem consistently ridiculous, even when they are playing straightmen to Jeanie’s loopiness.
But Washburn also wants intensity and poetry, thunder and action. The promised storm arrives, and Finn finds her way into it, yet we never saw her transition from keyboard warrior to full-fledged berserker. Where was that shift? When was it? Jeanie’s step from comedy to horror seems to be the reason we are at the theater. Yet in the absence of that connective tissue, I was left thinking about the show’s beginning: Jeanie, sitting at her kitchen table, her tempest still contained in her teapot. We could tell that something bad was brewing in her, but — as with QAnon — the promised revelations were at their most thrilling as long as the writer was making us wait.
Anon Through Nov. 1 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes.
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